If you set out to build a “boil the ocean” business case for why to invest in data, analytics, and insights initiatives — stop. Use your precious time to instead focus on prioritizing the investment categories across where you are in your business-insights maturity, because they will yield tangible benefits — both top- and bottom-line benefits.

Most enterprises have already started their journey to become data-driven. They manage to transform at least some of their transactional and other operational data into signals, and they base at least some of their key operational, tactical, and strategic decisions on such signals. But getting signals from data is where many such efforts and benefits end. The next level of evolution — what Forrester calls insights-driven business (IDB) transformation — is the ability to transform enterprise data into insights, which in turn trigger actions that affect tangible business outcomes (while continuously learning from and improving the insights-action-outcome process and results). This is one of the key operating principles of a customer-obsessed enterprise and increasingly one of the highest priorities for CIOs and their chief data officer and chief analytics officer colleagues. For example, 69% of CIOs say that their firm has changed or is changing its management culture to rely on more quantitative decisions.

Excelling at IDB capabilities requires not just tactical but significant strategic investments into people, process, data, and technology. These efforts are neither trivial nor inexpensive, and enterprises need to justify these multimillion-dollar investments. While causal proof of high returns on IDB investments is extremely complex and often impractical to obtain, there’s solid correlational evidence. For example, firms that have advanced IDB capabilities are 2.8x more likely to report double-digit year-over-year growth than firms that are still at the beginner stage. In our latest research, “Build A Maturity-Based Business Case For Insights-Driven Investments” (the business-case report in our insights-driven business playbook), clients will find:

  • Where to invest across strategy, process, people, data, and technology capabilities for advanced vs. intermediate vs. beginner firms.
  • Typical tangible benefits that advanced IDB firms can expect as compared to their beginner peers and competitors.
  • Expected ROI on IDB investments.

Data, analytics, and insights investments are becoming more crucial than ever to stay ahead of uncertainty and get smarter about every aspect of your business: your customers, your suppliers and partners, your competitors, your employees, your processes, your operations, and your markets.

Questions? Thoughts? Feel free to set up an inquiry with us.